Re: A Call For Open Governance Of X Development

On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 05:21:56PM -0500, Leon Shiman wrote: 
> Havoc - Why should a judgement of "pay-for-say" be any different for X.Org 
> than for GNOME foundation?

I'm not saying it should be - GNOME Foundation doesn't give any
special benefits to corporate members. 

http://foundation.gnome.org/documentation.html

I would definitely not argue X.org (or an XFree86+X.org combo) should
be different from GNOME Foundation; our incorporation and setup took
years and lots of pro bono legal work, and works well, so one idea
might be to recycle the GNOME bylaws etc.  rather than rehashing all
the arguments and finding new lawyers and on and on. ;-) But I have no
illusion that will really happen. ;-)

> >I propose that we set a hard deadline for discussion and decision on
> >X.org, or it will drag on forever.
> 
> There are a lot of practical reasons for resolving this very quickly, but I 
> don't know who is the "we" who would set it. X.Org, with the participation 
> of an XFree86 representative, have (as Steve indicated) already
> begun.

What I'm saying is that I would like us (us = whoever is interested)
to proceed with the creation of an X.org alternative after some finite
time has elapsed without X.org being repaired. i.e. we can't wait
indefinitely; it's been pretty clear that X.org is broken for years
now.

But at this point X is actually starting to move forward quickly, and
it's becoming important to explicitly resolve the issue.  When is an
API "done" and when might it still change due to standardization? We
need an answer to that question.  We need a way to formalize the
freedesktop.org process. We needed all this last year, as demonstrated
by the fontconfig/STSF thread.

Call me a pessimist, but I'd expect X.org to move slowly, and then
come up with a proposal that falls short of what it should be.  I
don't necessarily think people have bad intentions, but if you have a
particular structure wired into your finances, your bylaws, and your
external commitments, you can't just change it overnight without
making people angry and potentially breaking the law.

This may not be the fault of the people at X.org, but if it's going to
take a year to change, we need to look elsewhere, regardless of whose
fault it is.

Havoc